Govt plans extending CCTNS for automatic traffic management

The Centre is exploring the possibilities of extending the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS), which aims to connect police stations across the country online, for automatic traffic enforcement.
The issue was discussed threadbare at a meeting chaired by Home Minister Rajnath Singh and attended by Surface Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari and top officials of Ministries of Home and Surface Transport.
The advantages and disadvantages of extending the CCTNS for automatic traffic regulation and enforcement were discussed so that the accident rates in the country could be reduced, official sources said.
"About five lakh people die every year due to road accidents in the country. We are looking for improvement of roads and crash prevention through intelligent traffic system," Gadkari told reporters after the meeting.

The CCTNS launched by the then Home Minister P Chidambaram in the aftermath of 2008 Mumbai terror attack is a centrally funded project with an outlay of Rs 2,000 crore aiming to provide pan-India search on national database of police, courts, prisons, fingerprints, forensics and prosecution, for informed decision making.
CCTNS project will interconnect about 15,000 police stations and additional 5,000 offices of supervisory police officers across the country and digitise data related to FIR registration, investigation and charge sheets in all police stations.

This would lead to development of a national database of crimes and criminals.
The full implementation of the project with all the new components would lead to a central citizen portal having linkages with state level citizen portals that will provide a number of citizen-friendly services.

These include services like police verification for various purposes like issuance of passport, reporting a crime and online tracking of the case progress, online reporting of grievances against police officials, accessing victim compensation fund and legal services etc.
The project will enable national-level crime analytics to be published at increased frequency, helping policymakers as well as lawmakers in taking appropriate and timely action.
It will also enable pan-India criminal/accused name search in the regional language for improved inter-state tracking of criminal movement.